There's nothing really wrong, linux buffers and caches ram that you're not using
for applications. The 39Meg free is a window that Linux leaves *really* free, but
on top of that there's a big bunch in buffer and cache that it can instantly liberate for
application use if needed

Thanks for the quick reply Mark. Im glad to see there's nothing running away per se, but by process of elimination that means my system is painfully slow due to hardware, or FC5. Its been a while since Ive had a win32 OS on this box, but I definitely remember it being faster than this.
I'll keep tinkering, but suggestions are welcomed.

He covers how to strip out the unneeded services that most
home users don't need. That's the first thing I do after installing
Fedora, There's also a few annoying cron jobs I get rid of
but some of those are no longer on by default.
Mark

He covers how to strip out the unneeded services that most
home users don't need.

I´ve done this more than once. Since installing FC 5, however, the boot up sequence takes intorerably long. Like ten minutes. Individual user logins take 2-3 minutes up to 5 minutes.

I strongly suspect there´s a problem in some service which is running but don´t know what to do next.

During boot up, if I sit and watch it go, the first problem arises at ¨ starting named ¨ ... this takes 3 minutes or more. Other trouble points are NFS daemons.

After boot up, when I log in I get an error message that states Power Manager cannot run unless messagebus is enabled, and the error message suggests I always leave messagebus enabled. However, according to the services menu, message bus is enabled (it even gives its PID).

mjmwired.net says that gpm should be disabled, or at least enabled for run level 3 but disabled for run level 5. According to the services menu, gpm is not running. However, when I ps -e from the console, I see several (at least three) processes that are gpm-xxx (e.g., gpm-binary). Should I see those processes if the service isn´t running?

Can someone give me a clue what to look at next ... I´ve got to figure out how to return to a normal boot up time. This is ridiculous as it is now.

If you didn't have gpm turned on for level 5, then you wouldn't have
console cut and paste when you're running KDE or gnome and
then go to a virtual console window by pressing Cntrl+Alt+F1,...,F6 ,
which wouldn't be very good. However, I never actually run in level 5,
I boot to level 3 and then run KDE manually via startx which
I like better.

About the NFS and named, do you need this box to do DNS serving?
Also, when the "Starting ..." message shows, does it say:

Starting NFS services:
or
Starting NFS daemon:
at the point when it hangs? Which one will give a clue to what's
holding it up (where it hangs in the /etc/init.d/nfs script)

There is something drastically wrong with eggcups. I've got a program that prints over 20,000 pages and although everything works fine, after the job is done eggcups keeps the cpu at 100% and seems to have sequestered most of my memory. Not sure at this point if its related to large print ques or what although the print que size is managed.

I'm working on the issue, and hope to have a follow on post soon, but one thing I'm sure of is that eggcups in FC6 is broken.